A Bytecode Virtual Machine

Our Java interpreter, jlox, taught us many of the fundamentals of programming languages, but we still have much to learn. First, if you run any interesting Lox programs in jlox, you’ll discover it’s achingly slow. The style of interpretation it uses—walking the AST directly—is good enough for some real-world uses, but leaves a lot to be desired for a general-purpose scripting language.

Also, we implicitly rely on runtime features of the JVM itself. We take for granted that things like instanceof in Java work somehow. And we never for a second worry about memory management because the JVM’s garbage collector takes care of it for us.

When we were focused on high-level concepts, it was fine to gloss over those. But now that we know our way around an interpreter, it’s time to dig down to those lower layers and build our own virtual machine from scratch using nothing more than the C standard library . . .